Coming Attractions

Autonomous Vehicles

The Navly self-driving shuttle on the Lyon Confluence, Lyon, France. Driverless, autonomous, and fully electric, the shuttle carries passengers between the Confluence shopping area and the tip of the peninsula. Equipped with lasers, cameras, and highly precise GPS, the Navly shuttle will reach 25km/hour, but be safe for passengers or pedestrians.

The convergence of motion sensors, GPS, electric vehicles, big data, radar, laser scanning, computer vision, and artificial intelligence is hastening the arrival of autonomous vehicles (AVs)—cars that drive themselves. Experts predict they will make up 75 percent of road vehicles by 2040. Whether AVs will have a benign, neutral, or negative impact on society and the planet is unclear.

How cars are owned and utilized today could not be less efficient: They are driven 4 percent of the time. If mobility comes to be viewed as an on-demand service—rather than private ownership of expensive, two-ton assemblages of steel, glass, plastic, and rubber—the material savings would be immense. The U.S. auto fleet could decline by 50 to 60 percent. But it would require a massive cultural shift.

There are other potential advantages. For starters, AV concept models are smaller and more aerodynamic. In dedicated lanes, they can form platoons and draft, as cyclists do in a peloton. Autonomy is likely to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles because most trips are local and in battery range. Still, big questions remain: Will AVs be used for ridesharing or single occupancy? Will their convenience drive miles traveled up, rather than down?

References

Paradise and Iron: Breuer, Miles J., and Michael R. Page. The Man with the Strange Head and Other Early Science Fiction Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

$2 trillion per year; 4 percent of the time: Zimmer, John. “The Third Transportation Revolution: Lyft’s Vision for the Next Ten Years and Beyond.” The Road Ahead (blog). September 18, 2016. https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revolution-27860f05fa91.